


take these walls, these wars

by gatheringbones



Series: such wolves as you [4]
Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Bisexual Female Character, Established Relationship, F/M, Medical, Self Care, Trauma and recovery, debilitating injuries that would probably take six months of physical therapy but hey magic, dorian pavus humiliation conga line
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-01
Updated: 2016-03-01
Packaged: 2018-05-24 01:53:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,015
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6137248
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gatheringbones/pseuds/gatheringbones
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>To give her credit, the liberation of the Emprise du Leon goes perfectly well right up until Lavellan ends up lungshot and dying in the snow. </p><p>Solas doesn’t take it well.</p>
            </blockquote>





	take these walls, these wars

* * *

 

 

_“I did not want to think so much about her. I wanted to take her as an unexpected, delightful gift, that had come and would go again — nothing more. I meant not to give room to the thought that it could ever be more. I knew too well that all love has the desire for eternity and that therein lies its eternal torment. Nothing lasts. Nothing.”_

― Erich Maria Remarque, Three Comrades

 

* * *

 

 

The first arrow did the trick.

The second was more of an afterthought.

It did not _quite_ drop her in her tracks—she did not let it. The first punch to her lower ribs sent her skidding backwards, only to be saved by the solidness of her stance. Even when the second arrow clipped her arm and nearly sent her spinning to the ground, she only staggered, toes digging into the mud, and did not fall.

Laeta was still very, _very_ angry however, and the overwhelming affront that came from being successfully _shot_ was more than enough to render it largely irrelevant.

The line of Red Templar bowmen on the south side of the room fell back, arrows still nocked as their infantry moved up through the ranks. Their demon lay dead, the bulk of Suledin Keep had already been sacked, but a willingness to die for the cause had never been something Samson’s forces lacked.

This would complicate things to an untenable degree, as Laeta’s forces currently consisted solely of her and three hundred pounds of Iron Bull.

Dorian was behind them somewhere, having been summarily taken out of the fight when that maul had made contact with his sternum. Cole was…somewhere, undoubtedly _helping,_ but in less immediate ways than she currently required.

Later, she would not remember the details that surrounded the end of the battle, or any mopping-up that took place. She would not remember whether she took a deep breath before raising her arm, although of course that would have been impossible with an arrow in her lung.

She would remember the lack of pain, however.

She would remember the light coming from the Mark in her palm, glowing like the center of the Breach. She would remember the clarity of that moment, the weighing of what she was capable of versus how most effective she could make herself, and the solidity of that moment would comfort her later. It was familiar. It was the kind of person she had become since Haven.

It mattered, later, that there had been no pain. And when she opened a hole in the fabric of the world squarely in the center of the Templar ranks, she did it without hesitation, and without fear.

 

* * *

 

 

She had one moment of lucidity before things grew very, very complicated.

Later, she would wish she had made better use of it.

“Gonna sit you down now, Boss.”

Bull’s voice was as normal as she’d ever heard it—maybe a little exasperated, but so much of trudging through the Emprise du Leon had fallen under that category already that Laeta didn’t think it noteworthy. The voice that piped up immediately afterwards was more hushed, but less reassuring overall.

“Too light. Not enough to her. Tama bringing in a chicken from the yard, ‘Too skinny for anything but stew—’”

“Not _helping_ , kid.”

The ground was cold and she could feel the bite of snow begin to sink into her calves and the backs of her thighs, but she was grateful for the chance to stop being carried. Bull had not so much as brushed the shaft still sprouting from her ribs, not once in all the time he had held her, and when he lowered her to the ground he was as gentle as it was in him to be.

The arrow was too low to have hit her breast; she was grateful for that. She didn’t so much _have_ breasts as she did an area of her chest that breasts were commonly thought to inhabit, but they were hers, and she wanted better for them than that.

Rather, it was her lung that was the problem. And it was her other lung that was struggling to pick up the slack.

The ruined crags of Suledin Keep loomed overhead, as pale and cold as burnished steel. Bull had put her down next to Dorian, who was dead to the world, but breathing shallowly. His hair was wild and frightfully dark against the pallor of his skin, but neither Bull nor Cole had seemed unduly concerned. It occurred to her that that ought to worry her more than a little.

She tried to tell them as much.

She was largely unsuccessful.

Bull’s eye flicked over to Cole, who was standing over the both of them looking into the middle distance in that…way he did. “I know you can’t read her like you do the rest of us, but you wanna give it a shot?”

Cole blinked, slowly. He generally did it so little it was something of a novelty.

The cold didn’t seem to bother him, but he stood awkwardly, as if it hurt, and that was distressing for Laeta in a way that was different from how distressed she already was. There was blood on his terrible coat and blood on his ratty gloves and earlier today he’d clamped his legs around a man’s torso from behind and sawed his throat open, all with that same blank expression on his face. But somehow, he still looked like an overgrown child whose mother should have bustled him inside and sat him in front of the stove hours ago.

He knelt, his long knees digging into the ground. He reached out to take her hand, the one without the Mark. His hands were narrow and seemed to consist entirely of knuckle, and very chapped.

Laeta abruptly found herself in the middle distance that Cole was studying so intently, something she had never before experienced.

She began to understand why some considered it slightly uncomfortable.

Cole bit his lip.

Then, carefully, he said, “She’s afraid.”

Bull exhaled, ending it on a swear, and palmed the back of his neck with one hopelessly bloodied hand, the stumps of his missing fingers gone a darker grey with cold. “Aw, Boss,” he said wearily, “help is on the way, you just sit tight and—”

“No, not for her, for Dorian.” Cole squinted. “You put him down in a mud puddle. She thinks he’ll never forgive you.”

“Oh _that,”_ said the Iron Bull, glancing at the prone, soggy lump in the snow beside them. “I’ll just tell him it’s one of those Orlesian age treatments. He’ll get so pissed off he’ll forget all about it.”

Laeta shook slightly. On the whole, this was a poor choice.

“Knock that off,” said the Bull quickly. “That wasn’t that funny. Breathe, Boss.”

“Don’t cough, _don’t cough,”_ whispered Cole in time with her own thoughts, and it helped, hearing it out loud. It did.

She didn’t cough, though the effort it took not to almost tore her in half. She breathed through her nose, her tongue clamped tight to the roof of her mouth.

Blood pushed against the back of her throat, brought up with every exhale. The arrow rose and fell slightly with the movement of her diaphragm. She thought it would make her sick.

It was getting much harder to do as she ought to.

Cole shifted position, the listening expression on his face not changing in the slightest. He ended up sitting beside her in the mud, their backs to the piece of rubble the Bull had propped her up against. Slowly, cautiously, as if he was unsure whether it was strictly done or not, he put his arm around her.

He smelled like scalp, to be quite honest— _unwashed_ scalp at that, but something about that human smell and his very human attempt to comfort her dissipated some of the urge to cough herself to her actual death. She was grateful for that. He squeezed her shoulder, as if in acknowledgement.

Bull glanced at him again, but said nothing. He didn’t move, either, though staying in that crouch in front of them had to be killing his knee.

Laeta breathed in. It took a long time.

“He’s heard,” said Cole softly. “The runners brought him the news. He is taking one of their horses now.” He paused. “Cassandra is very angry.”

“Should have brought her,” grunted the Bull. “Wears more armor than _this_ one.” He jerked a thumb in the direction of Dorian, who was beginning to sink even deeper into the mud and undoubtedly ruining a great deal of Minratheon silk in the process.

“She wants you to be nicer to him,” said Cole with only the barest approximation of the indignation she actually felt.

Bull’s canines gleamed against the darkness of his face. “Trust me, he doesn’t want me to be _nice_ to—oh for fuck’s sake Boss, stop _laughing.”_

It didn’t hurt too badly, and she didn’t jostle the arrow, but there was suddenly a lot of blood, and that in and of itself was upsetting. There just didn’t seem to be anything she could _do_ about it.

She must have left for a bit, because the next thing she knew, Bull was saying her name and one of his huge hands was wrapped around her upper arm. She didn’t know how long he’d been saying it for, but she wanted him to stop touching her when he was clearly so worked up. It hurt. He had never hurt her before and that upset her very much.

Cole was still next to her, still behaving more or less like a helpful plant bolstering her up to reach the sunlight. His face was close to hers. His breath did not smell very good and she thought somewhere very far away that she and Varric were going to have to explain about teeth powder and washing behind one’s neck every week or so, but he _was_ comforting. In his own way.

“He’s coming,” he said, very softly this time, and directly into her ear. “He is pushing the horse very hard.” He hesitated, then added gently, “Your name is a shard of glass in his mouth.”

Bull was becoming very loud now. He was standing and looming over her like he wanted to pick her up again, and that was the last thing Laeta wanted. She tried to tell him, tried to tell _Cole_ to tell him, but both of them were getting much more difficult to hear and it was getting harder and harder to make the words stay straight in her head.

She wanted to stay where she was and listen for hoof beats.

She wanted, very badly, for someone to pull the arrow out already.

No one else seemed to think that this was a priority, and no matter how foggy she felt, that upset her very much.

In the end, she reached for it herself. It seemed to be the right thing to do.

She focused all of her concentration. Raised her hand. Knocked her fingers clumsily against the shaft, then got a proper grip on it.

The Iron Bull shouted something. It didn’t seem to be at her, not exactly, but it was his battlefield voice, and it was too much to bear just at that moment, so Laeta gave up entirely and fled into darkness.

 

* * *

 

There were always going to be rumors about Laeta sleeping with various members of the Inquisition—the most memorable involving Seeker Cassandra, an oiled-up pantheon of Antivan prostitutes, and a statue of Andraste put to creative use—but sadly, for the most part, she _had._

Campaigning was long, dreary, exhausting work, and in the long days before they’d stumbled almost literally across Skyhold, Laeta had wound up in any number of occupied beds entirely in the interest of her own survival.

The Frostbacks were _cold_. Her _feet_ were cold. As far as she was concerned, becoming the most powerful military leader in southern Thedas meant she was entitled to warm feet.

Bull, honestly, was the superior choice—chaste as a lamb, gave off heat like a blast furnace, and if it weren’t for the fact that he was generally occupied with other, more, er, goal-oriented partners four nights out of five, she would have made it a permanent position. Cassandra _had_ in fact deigned to allow Laeta a spot in her bedroll once or thrice during the shocking chill of desert nights, and Cassandra had one-up on Bull as far as Laeta was concerned, seeing as she went out like a light within seconds, didn’t budge an inch, and was far too moral to snore. Bull only gained back some of the advantage seeing as he was comfortably and wonderfully fat, and the Seeker had arm muscles like bricks wrapped in leather. Laeta genuinely worried about bruising.

(Blackwall had never, ever come up as an option. Laeta was very polite to him, and was very grateful for the insight and resources he provided, but could never, ever shake the feeling that if went to sleep within four feet of him she would wake up with him a hair’s width from her face staring at her with a wounded expression.)

During the interminable slog through the Emprise, she and Dorian had clung together like wretched, complaining limpets as soon as the sun went down. Oftentimes even beforehand. Despite the fact that being caught in a compromising situation wasn’t terribly likely (and that in this weather, there was finally the opportunity for proper spooning, despite how much Dorian griped about it), they were neither of them happy or warm for the three weeks it took to breach the Keep’s outer defenses.

(Bull had offered to help with this, which Laeta would have gladly taken him up on if it weren’t for the fact that Dorian became inexplicably and _mortally_ offended at the suggestion. Laeta still would have taken Bull up on this if she wasn’t concerned for Dorian’s actual safety were she to abandon him in his hour of need. He was the only person she had ever met with colder feet than hers.)

But the fact remained that while waking up cheek-by-jowl with someone she had a purely professional relationship wasn’t exactly _new_ for her, she still had room for surprises.

Waking up next to Cole was one of them.

He smiled hopefully at her.

From this angle he looked like a garden snail that had shot up through puberty and banged its head on the ceiling hard enough to dislodge its eyestalks.

“Hello,” he said in that soft, calm voice. “I’m supposed to tell you you aren’t dead and that Cassandra is going to shout at you.”

Laeta made a noise.

It was truly all she was capable of and it wasn’t much of an effort at that.

There was a white-hot fist somewhere in her lower ribs that squeezed and expanded cruelly with every shallow breath. Linen kept it strapped down—she could feel the warm, wrapping weight around her midsection—but the pain glowed like a coal. She closed her eyes again, blinded by the amount of light, still utterly puzzled by the presence of _Cole_ of all people, and endeavored as best she could to transform the world into a more sensible place.

She wasn’t too terribly successful. When she opened her eyes, Cole was still there, still on top of the covers beside her, looking for all the world like a very long and very kindly corpse.

His awful hat was nowhere to be seen—truly, it was the first time she’d seen him without it—and his hair was overly long and curled slightly at the ends with damp. He looked as if someone had taken all the soap in the world to the back of his neck and behind his ears.

He glowed with cleanliness. It didn’t lessen his resemblance to an earnest pond creature in the slightest.

It was then that she noticed she was crying, and had _been_ crying since before she’d even woken up, and then everything really did become too bewildering for words.

It was an awful idea, truly—people weren’t meant to cry while lying flat on their backs, for one, and she was already so dehydrated that actual tears didn’t seem to be forthcoming anytime soon—but she couldn’t help it. She _hurt_ , and the last thing she remembered had been doing her best not to die in the snow.

“Yes, I know,” said Cole. “ _Can’t breathe. Can’t think. Can’t stay awake._ But you can, now. There are sheets, and a fire, and a chamber pot. Though I’m…not sure how to help you with that last one.” He sounded extremely dubious, but also as if he would do his best if the occasion called for it.

Creators help her, the occasion would never call for it.

“You’re too kind,” she said, somehow.

Talking was also a mistake—her throat was dry, and there was no mistaking the tang of old blood when she swallowed, which had the unfortunate side effect of making her brutally nauseated. If she added _retching_ to the mess she would have to search down the archer who shot her and ask him very sincerely if he didn’t mind trying harder next time.

“You can’t, he’s dead now,” said Cole calmly. “You opened a hole, and demons pulled him through. It’s alright, he was glad to be done with it. Please sit up. I won’t make you cry.”

He was stronger than he looked—he _had_ to be, honestly, people didn’t run as skinny as Cole did without actually being one of those walking corpses you only found in places where the Veil sputtered like a candle flame—and he was able to get his arm under her and lever her upward until her back was against the headboard without hurting her too badly. He then managed to get a cup of water in her hand and a pillow behind the small of her back as well, as efficiently as any nursemaid.

Somehow, she stopped crying, and she was grateful for that. She didn’t know _why_ she wanted to cry so badly, other than that it seemed like the most reasonable thing for her to be doing.

She could breathe now, and Cole was right; it helped.

Her lung felt hot and tight and complained bitterly every time she expanded it to take a breath, but it was a stretchy, whining sort of pain that didn’t seem in imminent danger of killing her.

Her wrists were as useless as wet rope, and she had to swallow three times before the water no longer tasted like the blood coating the back of her throat, but when she did she was finally able to look at the room around them.

It was no army tent, that was certain.

The walls were stone and easily a foot thick if the windows were any indication. The glass was in poor condition—cracks spiderwebbed from the leaded frame, with missing panes letting in small breaths of snow that melted immediately upon meeting the warmth of the room. There was a truly extravagantly large fireplace packed with what seemed to be broken pieces of furniture— _expensive_ furniture if she was any judge, but far be it from her to blame whoever laid the fire for making do with what was available.

Her bed was easily twice as large as the one she had at Skyhold, but sagged at one corner, where a splintered bedpost made it seem like the frame had been none-too-successfully hauled through the doorway. The headboard itself was Orlesian with imitation Dalish scrollwork scrawled around the edges. _Poor_ imitation Dalish scrollwork, but lavishly covered in gold gilt, as if to make up for the appropriation.

The pieces clicked together in her head.

“We took the keep,” she said.

“Oh, yes,” said Cole agreeably.

The pain in her ribs flared as she tensed. “Did we—did we lose more men moving up from the valley, is _Imshael_ — _”_

“Very, very dead,” said Cole as if he were reciting it. “Dorian said to tell you that. He also said to…congratulate you on your growing collection of derelict fortresses, and also that he is sending you the bill for his laundress.” “He doesn’t have a laundress,” said Laeta distractedly. “Leliana told him he had to share.”

“ _Blood on her lips,”_ said Cole. “ _He should like to shout at her but he will be thrown out again if he does. Blistering incompetents the lot of them, no Healers for a hundred miles and_ — _”_

“Please don’t,” she whispered. “Oh please don’t.”

The urge to cry was worse this time, mostly because she had no defense against the idea of Dorian actually fussing over her. The man refused to spoon, for Mythal’s sake.

“It’s really all right,” said Cole, puzzled. “You’re better, Solas made sure of it. And I don’t know about the rest, but I think no one else died, or if they did, it wasn’t your fault.”

 _Oh Creators,_ she thought. _Solas._

It was a different sort of pain—more akin to panic, really—but at this rate she would be fighting the urge to weep until she was doddering to her grave. For someone who usually wept about as much as she praised Orlesian academic correspondence, this was an interminable offense.

She tried as hard as she could not to think about the brief, wobbly, red-soaked window of time she’d had between getting shot and passing out, and what Cole had said right before things had gotten to be too much to bear. For one, it was upsetting. Also, he could undoubtedly still hear her. But—

_Your name is a shard of glass in his mouth._

Laeta raised both wrists to scrub at her eyes and breathed as deeply as she could. It didn’t steady her as much as the sharp ache in her chest, but it brought her back down and she was grateful for that.

She sniffed once, and allowed herself a few seconds to feel very tired and overwhelmed. Then she took herself well in hand. It was easy. She knew where all the pieces were, and how they fit together—how they _must_ fit together if she were to survive all of this.

It was no different, she thought, than fleeing Haven. Waking up in the tunnels beneath the Chantry with cracked ribs and a mutinous shoulder and three smashed toes from the earlier fight, not allowing herself to wonder where or _why_ she still was, only categorizing what was left and willing it to more or less work in cohesion. She hadn’t woken up weeping _then,_ but it had been a close thing. She supposed she was due, honestly.

“Cole,” she said when she could manage it, blinking hard several times and lowering her hands. Her voice was undeniably soggy, but bright and steady. “How were the baths?”

Life flooded into his face, and his eyes lit up with something that looked very much like awe. “ _Wonderful,”_ he said.

 

* * *

 

She dozed, eventually, and when she woke up once more Cole was gone. She was only a very little bit sad about this, as he was undoubtedly the _kindest_ …physical manifestation of an altruistic concept she had ever met, but a very knobbly and uncomfortable bedmate. Laeta knew herself to be a very knobbly and uncomfortable bedmate at the best of times, and was giving very serious thought to the fact that they both might need more in the way of feeding up.

Cole had been very happy to talk about the baths at length, and in a manner that almost approached being straightforward. Or as close as he ever came to it.

Bull had taken him, which Laeta thought was rather for the best, and from the sound of it he’d enjoyed himself a great deal. He had explained soap, and skin pores, and proper horn care and maintenance and Cole had soaked it all up like a goggly-eyed dishrag. He had very much liked the steam room (“Everyone takes off their skin, and then takes it off again. Sitting side by side, skinless and sanded smooth by the heat, and also no talking. The Iron Bull said the rules of the steam room said no talking.”).

Laeta had let herself feel a small stab of longing for the baths at Skyhold—deep enough to drown a bronto, and a steam room with enough benches to truly stretch out and drowse. It had been three weeks since she had last seen her beautiful, soaring, ramshackle fortress— _hers,_ a thought that never failed to rock her back on her heels—and it had been on that thought that she had finally drifted into a patchwork sleep, still propped up against the headboard.

(Of course, there _had_ been something in the way of Cole quietly providing her with a draught at the exact moment she needed it, when the pain in her chest turned on her like a beast whose attention she had finally caught. It had crested like a wave over her head, but there Cole had been, with medicine at her lips and a hand on her back to help her drink it. She’d nearly cried all over again at the sweetness.)

Laeta was stiff when she woke, and her chest still hurt, but dreaming of her pile of stone and stained glass in the Frostbacks had comforted her.

She wondered when that had happened, exactly. When she had stopped wearing the idea of owning a fortress like an ill-fitting shirt, when the nagging thought that sooner or later _someone_ would take it away from her had finally faded away.

She also woke with something finally approaching an appetite, and opened her eyes fully with the intention of calling for some soup, but her voice caught in her throat.

Solas was sitting by her bedside.

His face was very, very tired.

He did not sit in his chair so much as he formed a loose amalgamation of bones and battered clothes that the chair helpfully held off of the floor. His hands were sitting upturned on his knees, the fingers curled slightly inwards, and he was looking at them with a flat, weary, and ultimately dubious expression that did nothing to lighten the amount of grey in his face.

Laeta’s breath was shallow in her chest and it didn’t hurt as much to breathe. Her hands and feet were warm, at last, and she was grateful for that. The only sound in the room came from the fire and from the click in her eyelashes as she blinked, slowly and sleep-sticky, and indulged herself in looking at someone who she loved.

And she did.

She did love him.

It cracked through her, like lichen through rock, and warmth bled out through the fractures.

There was no rush of surprise about it—she was not caught off-guard, and she was not unhappy to realize that this was, in fact, true. It had doubtlessly been true for some time, before the campaign in the Emprise, and not long after she had taken him in hand and told him, as kindly and graciously as she knew how, that it would please her for him to love her.

(His hands had shaken, the first time he had touched the soft skin beneath her navel. He had only steadied them by wrapping them around her waist, and by resting his forehead against her sternum. He had breathed, in and out, his spine bent like a like a terrible weight was on his back and tension throbbing through his neck. She had slid her hands up to clasp around the back of his neck and held him to her for as long as it took for both of them to collect themselves—for really, she hadn’t been much far away from trembling herself. They had been very, almost pathetically overwhelmed that first time, but halfway through the second something became tangled and Laeta had nearly laughed herself into fracturing her skull on the bedpost. Solas had lunged for her with a truly undignified lurch, and between that and the sound of her cackling the feeling of being overwhelmed was replaced with the feeling of being worn out and sated and very glad of each other’s company. They had not ventured back.)

Truthfully, they had not had anything resembling the conversation that immediately preceded their becoming lovers ever since, and for all appearances neither of them wished to. Their time was better spent, and Laeta herself had little wish to explore the nagging suspicion she’d had from the very beginning—that Solas was bordering on allergic to the idea of someone being inordinately attached to him. Laeta thought privately that this was something best grown out of before one started getting lines in the corners of one’s eyes, but also felt that it wasn’t her place to judge. There were any number of things she herself refused to grow out of, and the vagaries and brutalities of emotional intimacy were an unfair battlefield at the best of times.

She hadn’t lied, of course. She hadn’t been sure if she’d loved him then.

It did however make her uncomfortable to realize that she actually wasn’t sure if it would be right to bring it up.

Her last lover, she had told as much as soon as the thought had occurred to her and hadn’t encountered any problems there. Aethyta had been as delighted as Laeta, only demonstrably moreso for how much bigger she was.

(Aethyta had been very tall, and very strong, and for months before they became entangled Laeta had taken enormous pleasure in watching the muscles in her upper arms burl as she propped her longbow against the ground and strung it in one smooth pull. It had all gone more or less downhill from there.)

They had continued to delight in one another right up until that one long winter where they were trapped in the same broken-axled aravel at a bottom of a canyon for two months and became thoroughly sick of each other.

Solas and Laeta had not had to do anything resembling sitting cheek by jowl in a wagon eating dried fish for weeks on end, but she would like to think they would make a cheerful go of it, and undoubtedly he would nap enough to make the closeness bearable. He was also a better conversationalist than Aethyta by far. Her last lover had enjoyed sex, pushups, and delivering long lectures on preserving bowstrings from damp, strictly in that order. It had been a very long two months.

A log cracked gently, then settled.

Laeta felt the firelight on her skin, felt the warmth draw into her chest with her breath and undo some knot that nestled there next to the worst of the hurt.

She must have made some sound, for Solas looked up from his hands and met her eyes.

She had thought he looked tired.

In reality, it was somewhat worse.

“Oh,” she said without thinking, her voice rough, “Oh, Solas, you’re awful, please come here. Please don’t look that awful.”

Her arms twitched upwards, and he reached out and took her hands with his, his fingers shockingly cold. She did her best to escape his hold and try to warm them, but he squeezed, once, and she stilled.

His eyes smiled at her. “You’re awake,” he said, and if her voice were gravel, his was the dust ground underneath.

The rest of the room was dark and the only thing that illuminated the pair of them was the light coming from the fireplace. There were lines in his face that she knew had been there before, but had never seen carved as deeply. She pulled his hands toward her, and did her best to speak without coughing or breathing too much, wishing desperately for another drink of water. “I’ve been awake for ages—I just fell asleep for a moment—when was the last time _you_ — _”_

He pulled back, and she let him. He drew the hand that bore the Mark to his face and pressed his lips against the heel of her thumb.

When she fell silent, he did it again, then tilted her hand to kiss the center of her palm. It was in their language now, and he spoke it well.

It was breathtakingly unkind of him.

“Stop that,” she chided when she felt capable of it. “I’m not dead. I can never quite seem to figure it out, and according to the Chantry I never will.”

“You did,” he said, tripping slightly over the words. “Die.”

Something tangled between Laeta’s mind and her ability to speak.

He smiled at her again. Sort of. The skin under his eyes moved upwards, in any case, but his mouth was tight, as if he were wounded as well.

“But what the Chantry doesn’t know certainly can’t hurt it,” he murmured at the end of a long silence. Her own thoughts still struggled to get out from under the weight of themselves, pinned down by shards of ice. “Or hasn’t yet, at any rate.”

His grip on her hands had transformed into a clutch. His knees pressed against the mattress and distantly she wanted to tell him to give it up and sit with her, as Cole had, if she didn’t suspect that that much effort was beyond him.

Laeta’s chest rose and fell, less evenly now. The wad of bandages on her ribs seemed thicker and heavier than it had before.

Something awful seemed to take control of the words coming out of her mouth. “It can’t have been for very long.”

Her hands hurt for a second or so before he remembered himself and relaxed his fingers. He would have let go entirely if she hadn’t caught his own before he could draw back. She had to. His hands were cold.

Solas’s breath huffed out of him. “Long enough,” he said.

He _smelled_ , she noticed. He had never smelled like anything in all the time that she had known him, but she had finally registered the dull reek as him. Unwashed clothes tangled with unwashed skin in her nose, bringing back Cole to her thoughts. Cole in his same ragged leathers from one week to the next, the skin behind his neck ringed with grime, all because he’d never connected the thought of having a body with the idea of treating that body like an object worth caring for.

The sleeves of his shirt were rolled up to his elbows, soaked and spotted with black.

“Is that mine?” she asked at last.

Solas met her eyes, but it wasn’t a joyful thing.

He didn’t answer her.

They made an awkward picture, she imagined, the pair of them in their silence. Her with her hitching breath and him, allowing her to hold on to his hands when his body language clearly said he would have pulled away entirely if left to his own devices.

The spirit, she thought. The one that died in his arms in the Dirth, scattering apart like a flock of birds made of ash. The look on his face when it had finally gone. _I will endure,_ he had said, and Laeta had mastered the flinch before he could see it.

He bore her touch like she was made of live coals, eating away at his skin.

She wanted to let go, then, if only because she did not want to be reduced to a thing to be endured.

She couldn’t, but the pull between the two sides pierced her.

 _I’m here,_ she wanted to say. _I love you. You rode to me when I fell, even when Cassandra shouted at you. I waited for you as long as I could, and when I woke you were here, and I love you for it. You’re sitting too far away, I can’t love you as well from that far away and I need to. You need me to._

“Come to bed,” she whispered finally. “Please, Solas. We’ll deal with it in the morning.”

He did smile at her then. It was cracked and battered around the edges, but had its own warm and weary light. It only broke her heart a little bit.

“You require sleep,” he murmured. “And I require—” His nose wrinkled. “A bath.”

“It’s no worse than me,” she said, and hated how her voice sounded when she did.

That put an end to it more than anything. She was treading perilously close to begging, and the iron in her balked at the idea of it.

The legs of Solas’s chair complained as he pushed backwards and rose unsteadily to his feet. He did not, in fact, let go of her hands.

The draught from earlier wrapped warm arms around her once more, or perhaps she had just overexerted herself. Either way, Laeta felt herself sagging.

Solas said something else that she lacked the grammar to properly pick apart, but she recognized the latter part— _isala ashir, vhenan._

“It isn’t fair,” she mumbled. “You never explain the declensions.”

The last thing she heard was him laughing, despite himself. The last thing she felt was warm lips on the high point of her cheek, where the gift of June’s craft spread its antlers wide.

It was better this time, the sinking into darkness. Even if it hurt just as much.

 

* * *

 

Cassandra did, in fact, shout at her.

It went on for some time and covered any number of topics. On some distant level Laeta was able to admire the Seeker’s comprehensive memory and eye for detail—it was marvelous, really, the amount of ground she was able to cover. She had always appreciated that about Cassandra, and had depended on it in any number of different ways throughout the course of the past few months.

On a different level, she wished for the sweet embrace of death.

Laeta was lying down when the shouting took place, and it was just as well, seeing as she wouldn’t have had the legs for it at the best of times. In short, Cassandra disapproved of the tactics used to mount an offensive against Suledin Keep, and likewise disapproved of Laeta’s decision to lead the world’s smallest vanguard _herself_ in order to take it. She disapproved of how she hadn’t even been consulted before doing so. She disapproved of Laeta’s flagrant lack of full plate armor. She _very_ much disapproved of the fact that their entire extraction plan had more or less consisted of “have Bull carry us out over each shoulder, wait for someone to come looking for us.”

To her everlasting guilt, it all began to run together for Laeta towards the end (something something “strategic farce”, “unforgivably reckless”, and other fragments of that ilk), but she only had a split second to accept the inevitability of her untimely demise before Cassandra was hugging her.

Badly. _Jabbingly_ , with the amount of studded leather she wore. It was, however, a very firm, well-muscled hug, and before it was over Laeta was treated to a sudden, thrilling rediscovery of what it felt like to be embraced by a woman with defined biceps.

“You are a fool,” said Cassandra when she pulled away. “But you know that. And you will not be so foolish again if I can help it.”

Laeta had been very overwhelmed by this display of familiarity and sweetness, and only the lingering fear of further disapproval kept her from expressing such.

Cassandra had no complaints about the fortress itself—“It is sturdy. And it controls all trade on the river. Do not listen to Dorian.”—and once she had gotten her anger out of her system the Seeker was all affable business. The Emprise was liberated. Food, lumber, and blankets were flowing to the villagers, and gold and grateful favors were flowing back towards Skyhold. Cullen had suffered what had appeared to be a mild stroke upon hearing Laeta’s condition, but Josephine was apparently very pleased with their efforts and had sent a shipment of fruit and wine to Suledin Keep on the next wagon caravan.

It was on the return leg of this same caravan that Laeta made the long, rambling journey back to her mountain fortress, crammed in beside bales of fur and weapons and an ominous locked casket of red lyrium for Arcanist Dagna to study.

Dorian joined her. He had a cracked sternum, a three-day-old beard, and was reduced to wearing someone else’s clothes seeing as his own had been thoroughly ruined by mud, blood, and the best efforts of the Emprise. He refused to put his head outside of the wagon unless he could bind a cloth over his terrible hair like a Rivaini grandmother, and blatantly stole her pain medicine whenever he got the chance. He also had nothing gracious to say about Orlais, its road system, or Laeta herself (this last one was because he had grabbed at her draught before she could get a chance to drink it and she had resorted to swatting his hands away while telling him what he really looked like with a middle part).

Cole made an appearance, on occasion, crammed in at the end of the wagon with the used bandages, empty wine bottles, and all the other detritus two invalids in a crowded living space accrued over time. There really wasn’t much he could do that would actually _help_ , but he did his best. Mostly this meant providing a target for Dorian’s peevishness while Laeta tried to doze amidst the jolting cargo and cutting remarks.

Eventually Dorian would run out of wind and simply begin drinking again until he nodded off along with her. (There was no use being aggressively sarcastic with Cole; it didn’t so much run off him like water off a duck’s back as much as it resembled an earnest duck being confronted with a thesis in thaumaturgic ethics. The two simply didn’t go together.) Bull couldn’t have fit in the wagon if he tried, but he always made a habit of walking behind it while making conversation, or more often by whistling irrepressibly. This inevitably bothered Laeta more than Dorian—Dorian loathed all disruption with equanimity, while Laeta was left wishing Bull could hit notes more reliably.

Solas was nowhere to be seen the entire journey.

Laeta wouldn’t wish a cooped up, miserable, and badly dressed Dorian on her worst enemy, but his absence confused her during the brief windows of time she was awake and upright. Even at night, when she was able to try her legs out by propping herself up against the wagon and taking one hitching, strategic step after another, he didn’t make an appearance. She genuinely worried about his being left behind entirely, if not for a few passing comments from Cassandra on his help with several alarming plants the Scouts had stumbled into ahead of the caravan.

So he _was_ technically present, just not…in attendance. Which left her feeling distressed and puzzled in equal measures.

She healed in fits and starts as they wound their way across Orlais towards the foothills of the Frostbacks. The arrow wound had been cauterized shut, forming a large, sunken patch of scar tissue fit to rival any Chantry sunburst, and it stiffened as it healed. She had to rely on her arms to pull herself upright in order to avoid using any of the muscles on her ribs or abdomen, which was often in and of itself painful, as her upper arm was also sporting a bandage. Lying down was difficult in the limited space of the wagon, and only meant that she would have to go through the tedious, difficult process of hauling herself back into a sitting position once she wanted a change. Ironically, it only grew harder to breathe once her scar became solid and set in its ways and no longer allowed her ribs to expand as much as they should.

She wished she had her fiddle to distract herself, but did not ask for it to be unpacked, seeing as she did not want to be summarily murdered by Dorian. She also didn’t even know if she could affect the posture necessary to play it. Every wrong stretch or unwise twist left her debilitated and nauseated—even more nauseated than the wagon already made her.

In other words, it was a long, frustrating, and deeply uncomfortable journey, and even when Laeta felt well enough to walk and even ride once or twice before her ribs complained too much, she was unhappy and tired for the bulk of it.

Then, of course, they rounded the ridge and saw her fortress on the mountainside before them, gleaming like an upturned antler in the sun, its towers and walls and the soaring slopes of its roofs making her heart turn over in flustered gratitude for daring to be hers.

“At bloody last,” drawled Dorian when he registered that this was, in fact, the last turn in the road before home. He had unearthed a pair of dark dwarven eyeglasses somewhere, and combined with the cloth over his hair it made him look like a dangerous if frail housewife from exotic climes. “It’s far too cramped in here to properly hang oneself.”

 

* * *

 

To say Josephine was pleased with their efforts in the Emprise du Leon was a gross under-exaggeration. She _glowed._ Laeta hadn’t seen her this happy since Queen Anora had written to personally thank her for the Inquisition’s assistance with those kitchen assassins.

“Half the landed families of the Antivan fleet won’t even speak to you unless you have three fortresses with the rent rolls to show for it. _We_ have four _.”_

“We don’t even own the one in Ferelden,” said Laeta dubiously. “We’re just…holding it. Until the Queen remembers. And we certainly aren’t demanding rents.”

Josephine flicked a graceful hand, still holding her pen. “It isn’t important. We have enough money in our coffers to claim it is all due to a grateful populace. You have done _marvelously._ ”

Laeta did not feel particularly marvelous. Her ribs ached; a wheel on the wagon had cracked halfway up the last switchback to Skyhold and she’d had to ride in on one of the baggage mules. For all she knew Dorian was still stranded five hundred yards from the portcullis, almost within smelling distance of his vault of toiletries. She had over-exerted herself attempting to stay balanced and in control of the barrel-bellied, iron-mouthed mule all the way to the fortress, and then, of course, Josephine had wanted to debrief her on the various ravens that had come in from the west where the Venatori were nestled in like ticks. And— ah yes, there were Cullen and her quartermaster on the sidelines, looking at turns impatient and hopeful. Laeta hadn’t had so much as a chance to wash her face or check her bandages since she’d reported in, and the likelihood of her getting to do so any time soon was diminishing by the second.

She’d had no interaction with Solas even after arriving home. In the courtyard, when she’d still been fighting that disaster of a mule to not smear her against the walls, she had thought she’d caught sight of a gleaming head vanishing into the main hall, but no more. A stunned sort of calm had dropped down over her shoulders and that was when she’d allowed herself to be shuffled into Josephine’s office and be debriefed on the opinions of the Antivan merchant’s fleet.

Laeta had next to no opinion on the Antivan merchant’s fleet, as she neither owed them money nor were they actively trying to kill her. She had very strong opinions about whether or not she could make it up the stairs to her quarters without collapsing in a heap.

Laeta only registered that Josephine had rolled into the next item of business by the frustration on Cullen’s face, and willed herself to focus. Nothing Josephine ever said was truly without consequence and Laeta had, after all, been gone for weeks without regular updates. For all she knew the goodwill of a handful of Antivan landowners was all that stood between her and a grisly defeat—but now they had moved on to the smoking crater that was all that remained of Adamant Fortress and what to do with it.

“It went centuries without anyone caring about it; I don’t see why we have to change that now,” said Laeta wearily.

She eyed one of the armchairs before the fire with grim hope that she might be able to sit down without covering it in mule sweat. It didn’t seem likely.

“I do not suggest that we _do_ anything with it, merely that we advertise that it is, in fact, no more,” said Josephine.

“How? Attach etchings of the rubble to all our correspondence?”

Josephine frowned. “That is…doable, but on the fringes of taste. I do not think you are—”

“Everyone and their mabari has heard what happened at Adamant,” said Cullen testily. “Our interests are further west, and have nothing to do with public _perception_ of—”

“Figure it out on your own,” said a voice behind them all. Laeta, who had been on the verge of blanking out once more, blinked and focused on the door. Varric was frowning at all of them.

She had never been more grateful to see him in her entire life.

He pointed a finger at Cullen. “ _You._ Talk to Harding. She hasn’t even been to the Wastes in weeks, and all your intel is a month old. You,” he said, switching to Josephine, “pick a different campaign. Nobody’s forgetting about Adamant, I’ll see to that.”

Laeta could not quite bury a flinch.

“And you,” he said, making eye contact with her, “Go to bed. There’s a Healer up there who’s going to knock you out for the next fourteen hours and I guarantee you most of this shit will sort itself out by then.”

“Ah,” said Josephine, guilt creeping into her voice. “Of course.” She seemed to look at Laeta for the very first time, and became visibly taken aback. “…Do you require any help reaching your rooms, Inquisitor?”

Laeta attempted to push herself off the desk she’d been leaning against and was unsuccessful. Cullen and Josephine abruptly wore matching expressions of alarm. It was oddly charming.

“Lean on me, Fiddlesticks,” said Varric tiredly. His shirt was rumpled and his hair as untidy as it had been ever since Hawke had failed to come back from the business with the Wardens, but he was still solid and warm and blessedly hard to faze.

“I liked Songbird better,” murmured Laeta once he had gotten his shoulder under her arm.

“Put some weight back on and you might make your way back to Songbird,” groused Varric. “Look, I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about this shit—you play a fiddle, you look like a bag of sticks, case closed.”

He was as good as his word as far as the Healer was concerned. Laeta made it to her rooms in time to register a matronly looking mage with fresh bandages and poultices spread across the desk before they had her off her feet and in her bed, and no spell was needed to make her drop into the deepest, blackest sleep she’d ever experienced.

She forgot to ask Varric whether all was entirely well with Solas, but honestly didn’t know how she would control her face when she did.

 

* * *

 

It would have been very difficult for Laeta to acclimatize to her life in the South if she were not a person fundamentally convinced of her own value.

This had never really a source of doubt for her. The utter failure of Corypheus to ever _truly_ intimidate her had been borne of his position that she was entirely without worth—an interloping freak, in his words, which had been a little hard to take from a creature whose head was constructed entirely out of various protruding forty five degree angles.

At no point in her life had her value ever been in question. Her grandmother would never have allowed it, for one. Her father, her cousins, and all her aunts and uncles would likewise have joined forces to attack whatever defect in the universe sought to convince her she was somehow unworthy—but it had truly never come up. Whatever Laeta was, she was a product of her own efforts, which were largely spent in service to her people, and performed entirely in good faith and to the best of her ability. Her failures were also hers, and there were many, but they were not _her._

(She would never forget the sheer idiocy inherent in continuing to occupy a largely indefensible mountain village while in the act of waging an actual war against a highly mobile enemy. There were _graves_ attached to her failures.)

This wasn’t to say she was a stranger to be being spurned in love. She and Aethyta had continued to exchange looks of flat, knowing hatred a good six months after their relationship had ended-- Aethyta had put the last nail in the coffin with an exquisitely timed comment regarding her being a horse-faced know-it-all and it hadn’t gotten any prettier from there-- and she’d spent more than enough time in her younger years wondering if a strained relationship could actually cause someone to drop dead from confusion. But she had grown out of it, and as her grandmother had informed her, youthful romances existed purely to frustrate elders and provide character-building bursts of humiliation; nothing more.

Simply put, Laeta was not often put in the position of doubting herself or her worthiness of love, and it was deeply ingrained in her to neatly sidestep any opportunity to do so.

This was very much put to the test the first two days she spent recuperating at Skyhold.

And then the two after that.

By the time she was well able to walk a full flight of stairs without wishing for her immediate death, she had gone almost two weeks without any direct contact with Solas at all.

It wasn’t an overt avoidance, save for the fact that their paths never crossed. If Solas had ever ignored her directly—looked through her, say, or actively left a room she had just entered—that would have put an end to it right then and there. It would have been both childish and cruel, and if Laeta ever seriously thought he had either of those qualities she would have mourned what she had _thought_ had been hers and move on, with no time or grief wasted on the actual person she’d lost.

She liked to think that was what she would do, anyway. Her grandmother would hardly approve otherwise.

But she slept alone. And every day she tested her legs and tried to stretch her scar (it had since hardened into a solid block of tissue, almost impossible to bend and deeply painful for the surrounding muscle) entirely by herself. She thought back to the moment she and Solas had spoken after she had woken up—it was difficult not to, in any case—to try to see if anything she had said or done had precipitated his behavior, but quickly came to the conclusion that no, she hadn’t. His actions were his own, and she had done nothing to prompt them.

She admittedly got stuck on that loop for a time, but broke herself free before long. That sort of thing also fell under the domain of what Keeper Deshanna would disapprove of, and nothing much Laeta ever did landed on that list.

When she thought about it—or when she _let_ herself think about it—anger came quickly to reach, but she always fumbled it somehow.

Or rather, the anger came and she felt it and it was _real,_ but there wasn’t much she wanted to do with it.

She wasn’t Cassandra; she didn’t want to shout. Even Corypheus hadn’t earned that from her. The most she had done was try to affect a very stern voice while holding what was left of her ribs together. Dropping a mountain on him had been much more effective and much less upsetting for her in the long run. Besides, every time the anger rose to an actually useful point she always remembered—

 _You did,_ he’d said, his face so numb it had seemed more like a mask. _Die._

And then he’d pulled the kindness back on, like a short-sleeved coat with holes in the elbows. A worn-out thing that barely fit him, but that he’d had to wear or else go skinless.

It didn’t excuse his absence, or the accompanying silence. But it had tangled up her anger with her desire to understand, and her anger had never yet won out against those odds.

Luckily, her desire for understanding had nothing on her dignity, and no force on Elgar’nan’s green earth would compel her to cut those four days of silence short herself.

In lieu of this, she focused elsewhere.

She walked the battlements. She took down her fiddle and oiled every peg, tightened every string, and tried to persuade her body to stretch into the easy curve of playing, even when it sent knives into the space behind her ribs. She persuaded herself, with some difficulty, to touch her scar, and learn its dimensions, its hardness, its reluctant pull.

She didn’t like having a part of herself so resistant to bending, to moving with the forces around her.

She was her grandmother’s through and through; she did not doubt herself. But it was difficult to incorporate her scar, and the arrow, and the memory of what it had felt like to die in the snow into what she thought of as _herself._

And it was even more difficult to do so alone.

Part of the solution, she realized at the end the fourth day, lay in not being alone. And it was with that thought that she took herself to the tavern.

It was early afternoon, and even the Chargers weren’t draped around the room like they usually were. The light trickled down through the beams overhead in golden shafts, shot through with glowing dust, transforming the shabby furniture and ancient rushes on the floor into something soft-edged and homey.

Maryden the bard was locked in a card game with a handful of former Circle mages in the corner, her odd, stretched lyre propped up against the table. (Laeta had never seen something with a neck that wide or that many strings before coming South, and still itched to try it. Maryden had very large, square hands, however, and was able to form the chords easily, while Laeta imagined she herself would struggle to snag the farthest strings with her smallest finger.) She almost joined them when her eye caught sight of Dorian at the bar, and she supposed she changed her mind out of a sense of duty.

“Ah,” he said tiredly when she settled herself at one of the adjoining stools. “Back to day-drinking, are you? Splendid.”

Dorian was utterly transformed from the last time she had seen him. There wasn’t a single surface on his ludicrously ornate clothing or impeccable skin that didn’t seem polished, laundered and buffed into perfection. It was easily more effort than she had seen him put towards his own appearance since she had met him—but then, she thought, he might have thought he _had_ to, after two weeks spent moldering in borrowed clothes.

 _Creators,_ she thought with a jolt of admiration, _is that_ gilt _on his eyelids?_

“You seem to have bounced back,” she said, pleased beyond measure. “Look at you.”

“Yes,” he said, staring at a glass of wine in his hand that was full to the brim and that he hadn’t so much as touched since she had walked through the door. “Bounced back. That’s me all over.”

Laeta squinted at him. “Are you in still in—”

She wasn’t able to determine if his chest was still hurting him because that was when the Iron Bull arrived out of nowhere behind them both.

“Boss!” he said happily, kissed her with an extended _Mmmmmwwah!_ on the cheek, bit Dorian alarmingly on the neck, smacked him on the ass, and swaggered away.

Dorian continued to stare lugubriously at his wine.

“Well,” said Laeta, after a long silence.

“If you say anything at all,” said Dorian, “if you ask me a single question, I will go home, embrace my father, learn blood magic, and return here to transform you into a fleshy gibbering horror incapable of human speech.”

“Oh,” said Laeta.

She chased a bit of moisture around the bar top with her fingertip. Dorian studied his wine critically, turning it this way and that in the light, then downed it in one long swallow after another.

After another thoughtful silence, she asked, “So has that developed _recently_?”

Dorian snapped his fingers at the barman and didn’t stop until his glass was full again. He drained it just as quickly, and did not look at her.

“All right then,” she said, then slid carefully off her stool to go find where Bull had settled. She patted Dorian on the shoulder as she left, which he steadfastly ignored.

“Looking good, Boss,” said the Iron Bull from the table he’d commandeered upstairs. He had an enormous bowl of rice heaped with greens and steaming meats that smelled so strongly spiced it made her eyes water. She had no earthly idea where he’d gotten it—everything _she’d_ ever had from their kitchens had come boiled gently to death over a period of decades—and was suddenly voraciously hungry for what seemed like the first time in weeks.

He slid the bowl away from her as she approached with her eyes on the food. “None of that,” he said darkly. “I know for a fact they still got you eating that warmed over baby crap till you get back on your feet.”

“I _am_ back on my feet,” she said. “Move over.”

He grumbled, moving farther down the bench, but his eye glinted as she stole his fork and started tucking into his rice bowl. “Nice to see you up and about, though.” The end of his sentence turned into a barely disguised cough as the heat overcame her within four bites, and he snagged the bowl back with only a mild eyeroll.

“You okay?” he asked as she drained his water and focused as hard as she could on not coughing. “In general, I mean. Wasn’t pretty for a while there.”

Laeta thought about it. “No,” she said carefully. “No, I’m not. But I will be.”

She was more than a little surprised to realize this was true, and that made her feel better.

His fork was absurdly small in his large grey hand, but he used it deftly enough, not registering the heat in the slightest as he ate. He shot her an apologetic look over his bowl. “Held you down while Solas was digging the arrow out. Sorry. Usually I try to check in before doing something like that.”

Her scar throbbed, once, but she held herself back from pressing her hand to it. She smiled, though. “It’s all right, Bull.”

It wasn’t, not entirely. But not through any fault of his.

She was then distracted by a plate of food being set down in front of her unasked by the barmaid. Fried potatoes jostled with enough bacon and tomatoes to make her want to weep into her hands, and none of it was _boiled._ She barely had enough presence of mind to thank her.

Laeta turned a question over in her mind as she demolished a good corner of her plate, testing the weight and heft of it.

Eventually, she said, “Have you seen Solas?”

She discarded the idea of amending it with _I need to talk to him,_ or _I’m returning a book he lent me,_ because she wasn’t sure if the first part was even true, and the last time she’d borrowed a book from him it had been a treatise on Orlesian philosophy and she had dropped it straight into a swamp.

Bull squinted wistfully into his empty bowl. “Nah. He was flat on his back the first half of the trip back, same as you and that one,” he said, jerking a thumb in Dorian’s direction.

Dorian now had his head on the bar, scrupulously clean hair be damned. The barman was cleaning one of his tankards and seemed to be nodding along with something he was saying. When Laeta looked back, the Iron Bull had a pleased, sleepy expression on his face.

Laeta blinked. “Was he injured?”

Bull shook his head, his horns describing small arcs in the air. “Nah. Wrung out. Did some kind of…spell…thing…patching you up, made him look like he’d fallen down eight flights of stairs afterwards.” He shrugged. “Neat work though. Not like heating up a sword blade and slapping it on.”

“He said I died,” she said. Her voice was very calm.

Bull settled further into his seat. “Eh. Stopped breathing, once or twice. He swallowed some lyrium, did some Fade shit—look, I don’t know, but you didn’t _stay_ dead.” He looked her over, his face unreadable, but then he reached out and pushed her with his fist, and she let herself be rocked back. “See? Good as new. Keep eating.”

This last part was said more gently. Laeta looked down at her food, wondering when her appetite would stop blinking in and out of existence and take all her energy with it when it did.

“Does a number on you,” said Bull when she started to pick at her potatoes again. “Big hit like that. Especially after. Your body lets you down for a while, till you either build it back up again or get used to it.” He shouldered her companionably; it was like being gently buffeted by a mountainside. “You’ll build back up, Boss. Arrows are cheap.”

His shoulder had a sunken pockmark that resembled her own. Without thinking she reached up and rapped it with her knuckles, and his teeth flashed. “See? Copper a dozen. Just try to get hit a little farther away from the tits next time.”

“Easier said than done,” she said, looking over his own scarred chest dubiously, then gave up finishing her plate as a bad job and pushed it away from her. Bull happily began eating it for her.

Out of nowhere, he said, “Go talk to him, Boss.”

Laeta’s breath escaped her in a long rush and ended on a groan. _Of course he’d noticed. Of course he did._

She then wondered if any of this had made into those reports he sent back to Seheron when he was still one of their agents, and gave very serious thought to copying Dorian by placing her head directly on the table.

“I was working my way up to it,” she said eventually, propping her elbows on the table and rubbing her forehead.

His eye crinkled at her. “I wouldn’t worry about him going to ground for a bit. People get weird when someone they care about gets knocked on their ass for a while. And Solas is already weird. Besides,” he said, scraping the last of her fried breakfast off her plate, “best thing for the Inquisition right now is you getting laid on the reg. Trust me.”

“Thanks, Bull,” she said drily.

“Don’t mention it.”

 

* * *

 

Laeta liked to think she couldn’t be motivated by fear as well as she could by other means.

That wasn’t to say she _couldn’t_ be. Adrenaline and dread were as powerful as they came, and she was just one battered elf from a forgotten corner of the Free Marches.

Dread could have sent her to speak with Solas as easily as anything else, but she was too calm for that. Dread did not often go hand in hand with calm, and between the quiet drift of the morning so far and what Bull had said, she couldn’t muster the level of anxiety required to let dread spur her.

In the end, she went because had decided that one way or another, she would like answers. That felt more true. It _was_ her truth, anyways. It ran along the path she had set for herself long before ever coming South, and it was one her grandmother would have approved of.

It helped that she didn’t have very far to look.

Climbing the long set of stairs from the courtyard to the castle keep tired her, but not as much as it had in days prior. She _was_ getting better, and that helped soothe any nerves she might have had. She wasn’t sure if anything in the way of a truly pain-free day was ahead of her in the weeks of campaigning to come, but she would settle for legs that felt strong beneath her and the ability to breathe deeply if she focused.

There was no one in the castle nave except for a serving girl diligently unrolling a freshly beaten carpet before the throne, and Laeta was grateful for that as well. The nobles often in attendance had never succeeded in making her anything other than nervous, but it was long before any of them would be up and about.

The flagstones felt cool and solid beneath her bare feet as she made her way to the base of the tower that Solas had claimed as his own. She walked through the door, and there he was, as he ought to have been, facing away from her as he stood at his desk.

He did not seem to notice her approach, at first.

Laeta then realized that she had rehearsed nothing before she actually entered the room, and it belatedly dawned on her that this may have been a mistake.

Then, out of nowhere she thought, _Creators._ _He managed to get all the blood out._

It had taken her a second or two to actually notice. His nothing-colored shirt was as clean as she had ever seen it, no longer spotted by blackening patches of her own blood.

It almost unbalanced her, and at first she couldn’t understand why. It took a second before she connected it to the throb in her ribs, and the care with which she still had to move. The energy she had to ration piecemeal throughout the day, when the entire premise of the Inquisition ran on the platform that she was an endless font of it.

She wasn’t sure if that was entirely worthy of her or not. That made her waver more. She had never thought she had it in her to resent someone for being healthy when she was not, and didn’t like feeling as though she could.

It made her want to be more polite, in any case. That helped.

“Solas,” she said from behind him, and his shoulders did not relax by even a fraction. He had heard her arrive after all.

He turned, then, and faced her.

It was clear that he was unprepared for doing so.

Laeta was under no illusions about what she looked like; the mirror in her quarters had done away with that, not to mention the reactions of some of her companions. Her injury and recovery had done away with a great deal of her softness—not that there had been very much to begin with. She had lost muscle in addition to fat, and was preemptively exhausted by the thought of the effort it would take to gain it back.

Her vallaslin sat differently on a face that had grown longer and thinner, with more bones in it than it had before. That had troubled her the most, at first, but she had studied it enough since then to reassure herself that nothing essential had changed, that she had her father’s chin and her grandmother’s cheekbones and no force on heaven or earth could take that from her.

She saw the shock travel through him and wanted to tell him as much, but held herself back. He could have gotten used to it before now, as she had, but had chosen not to.

It was uncomfortable, even so. He hadn’t spoken—he didn’t look like he _could—_ but she didn’t give him the chance.

“Are you well?” she asked.

It was a perfectly appropriate first question, and she almost congratulated herself on it.

Her words seem to take a second or two to penetrate, but then she saw his mouth firm, slightly.

“I am,” he said at last.

Laeta kept her shoulders straight as she padded across the room to the elderly divan on the far wall. She was fond of it, and there were still several books of hers on the adjoining table from the hours she had spent there before journeying to the Emprise. She ran her fingers across one briefly before bending a leg beneath her and sitting down, facing Solas.

Behind him, the scaffolding still stood up against the wall, the rickety ladder just where it had been the last time she had climbed it with her fiddle under her arm. She looked away.

“I heard you were indisposed,” she said.

“I have recovered,” he said.

She nodded.

He said nothing else, and had not so much as shifted his weight since he had turned to face her.

Laeta would never be accused of being a subtle person; she lacked the skill and patience for it. She left that to people like Leliana and Josephine, who could have entire conversations about very important matters while appearing to discuss something else entirely. Laeta was not capable of that same level of dissembling, but had never counted it as much of a loss, not even now. Subtlety would require more effort than she was willing to expend at the moment, and she was not obligated to do so in the least.

“I haven’t seen you in some time,” she said in that same even voice. “I wondered if it was because of something I had done, but I don’t think so.”

“No,” he said, then stopped himself. As she watched, his hand crossed to his opposite wrist and took hold of it.

Her fingertips rested easily on the arm of the divan as she watched him.

The silence, improbably, stretched longer.

After a moment it dawned on her that it was entirely possible that he had nothing to say to her at all.

Then, before cold clarity could take hold of her completely, he broke through.

“Are you—recovered?” he asked haltingly. “Are you in any pain?”

Below her left breast, her scar beat in time with her heart. As she breathed, the skin and muscles around it pulled sourly out of tune, but anchored her all the same.

“Yes,” she said.

The silence pulsed between them once more, but he did not let it rest as long as he had before. “I have herbs,” he said. “May I bring them to you later?”

She blinked.

He was more accustomed to subtlety than her, so it took a moment. But then she read the request for what it was, and something in her relaxed its grip.

“I would like that,” she said.

“Tonight,” he said.

She nodded. He did not relax his stance, and neither did he release his wrist.

It was by far the most stilted conversation she had had in her entire life, and had not gone remotely as she had expected. Or particularly wanted, truth be told. But it was also clearly _over,_ and not in the way that she had been gearing herself up to accept and move past if worse came to worst.

She allowed the moment to guide her and felt herself rise to her feet once more. It had been a welcome rest, in any case.

She nodded her leave, and turned to go when Solas spoke again.

“Laeta,” he said. She had not expected it, truthfully, and it rattled her out of her calm a little. Or perhaps it was just his voice when he said it. She finally understood what Cole had meant. How it sounded when someone said something that hurt them like glass.

She turned, with care. She did nothing hurried these days.

He stood closer to her but he did not reach out to touch her. His hands were clasped before him, one wrapped over the other for steadiness. It was different than when he was being arch and formal—he stood taller then, and held his arms behind him like a courtier.

There was nothing courtly about how he was standing now.

“I—” he began, but she cut him off.

“Tonight,” she said, firmly.

He closed his mouth, and his lips thinned as he did. He collected himself without changing his face in the slightest, but she could see him do it. She knew his patterns now and could recognize what ran beneath his skin even as he shut it down.

“Yes,” he said, very quietly, and then he watched her leave.

 

* * *

 

Laeta treated her body like a gentle animal that had happened to be placed in her care, and she did as well by it as she could.

She bathed, first of all. She did not think she could manage to soak in a deep tub without injuring herself entering or exiting, and she didn’t like to put the castle maids to the task of hauling that much water up so many stairs. Instead, she bathed in the manner she had been taught—before a fire, with an ewer of water and a soft cloth and oil for her hair that smelled like sweet coltsfoot. The latter was a relic from her Clan and there wasn’t much left of it, so for the most part she tried to use it sparingly. But not today.

She anointed herself with it at the crown of her head, and at the fine tufts of hair at her armpits, and at the hollow of her throat. She let the smell soothe the creature she was treating herself as—the soft, bruised thing with the ache in its lungs that the coltsfoot eased.

She rubbed soap into her palms, pressing it into the green heart of the Mark, and washed her ribs and the scar as gently as she could. Her feet she tried to wash with especial care, but had to stop as the bend in her midsection proved too much.

When she finished, she stropped her razor on the piece of halla leather it had been stored in and shaved her temples until all that was left was the queue running along the top. She had not done so since leaving for the Emprise and her hair had grown back in hedgehog spikes along the old lines. It felt good to reintroduce order to the confusion.

Her face was still thin when she studied it in the mirror, and her tattoos still sat strangely upon it, but she was clean and sleek and uncompromisingly Dalish once more. She was herself. Different, maybe, and perhaps older. But not unrecognizable.

Laeta swept her hair into the fire afterwards, sending up a small prayer as she did that it would go back to the sky and carry her thanks to Andruil for sparing her prey when she didn’t have to. There were no hawks circling outside her windows, so she did not know if the message was received, but it made her feel better to make the proper offering. The Dalish never prayed with the expectation they were being heard; that wasn’t what it was for. Duty without recompense was as much a part of her people as the aravels they rode, but really, it was about gratitude, nothing more. And gratitude was to be felt, not necessarily acknowledged or rewarded.

She built the fire up afterwards, and closed the glass doors, her feet sinking into the thick carpeting with every step. It pleased her now—it hadn’t, not at first; it used to be that she thought she would never get used to the excesses of her new castle, not to mention the bell pull on the wall and the chamber pot beneath her bed, but it was familiar now, and it pleased her to have warm feet.

Her fiddle hung on the wall nearest her desk, its silverite-wound strings glinting in the sunset. Every inch of its dark wood gleamed with as much care she could give it, but when she had dressed she took it down and sat cross-legged before the fire again to see if she could play and not simply polish.

It was a question of how she held herself, nothing more.

It wouldn’t be easy to amend years of playing to take the curve out of her spine and the easy looseness of her limbs, but she meant to apply herself to the task. When she balanced the spike on the floor and drew the bow across the strings for the first long note, it sounded as raw and sweet and lonely as it ever had.

She played on a knife’s edge now, as she never had before. She had to mind her breathing more, mind how her abdomen tensed as she held the position, and mind the how the muscles in her arm and shoulder pulled at the rest of her as she played. It was distracting, and forgetting herself meant an ugly twist of pain that allowed no room for compromise, but it could be done.

Besides—doubtless Mythal did not mind a hymn played by someone too dented and stiff to play it as sweetly as it should be heard.

Brick by brick she built herself back together in this fashion. With soap, and oil, and music, but with care most of all, and she extended it to herself without restraint. The pain did not vanish, but she was not as upset by this as she had been before. Her ability to manage it had grown, and she could still feel soft and comforted even alongside the ache.

He found her like this, in time.

Laeta rose as soon as she heard the door at the bottom of the stairs click shut.

She hung her fiddle back on the wall where she had found it, then pressed her fingers to the strings briefly. They were warm from playing, and the gut flexed beneath her touch like a living thing.

When she turned, Solas was at the head of the stairs, looking at her.

Her pulse sped up by a fraction. She wasn’t entirely sure she could help it.

She didn’t think she would ever get used to being looked at like that.

“Hello,” she said, standing by her desk with one hand resting upon it. Any number of things to say occurred to her at once, and it was difficult to choose between them. After a slight pause, she said, “I’m glad you came.”

It was true, she realized. That helped.

He stood squarely in place, as long and lean as ever. The soft light from the fading orange glow of the sunset was kinder to him—it smoothed the lines in his face and made him look warmer and younger by turns. He carried a small pot with him in both hands, like an offering.

“Is that for me?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said. Then, haltingly, “I apologize for the delay. It took time to collect the ingredients.”

He made no move to cross the room to where she stood. She didn’t know if it was reluctance, or if he were simply frozen to the spot.

“It should help with any lingering pain,” he said. “And it will minimize the scar.”

She laughed, softly, but said as gently as she could, “It’s too late for that.”

A sort of tremor ran through his face that made his eyes tighten for a second, but then it faded.

It seemed to bring them to another impasse.

To his credit, he seemed about to speak, when she turned and walked to her bed, settling down on top of the covers with one leg bent beneath her.

“Show me,” she said.

She watched him hesitate, and felt herself grow very still when he did. But then his face firmed and he walked towards her carrying the pot, his steps measured and smooth. He sat beside her on the bed, mirroring her posture with one leg beneath him, and set the pot between them.

“Laeta,” he said, a burr in his throat.

She watched him, carefully.

His eyes unfocused, and he seemed to choose his words with delicacy. “I am sorry,” he said. “I was not—as careful, nor as wise as I should have been. I avoided you, and I hurt you by doing so.”

“You did,” she said, watching him.

Solas rested his hand on the covers, and the fingers drew together until his knuckles became prominent. “After you were shot I—I did not take it well. I fared no better when you awoke. I feared--”

“What?” she asked.

He didn’t answer at first. His generous mouth had gone thin with his reluctance to speak, but she did not relent. Could not, if this were to get either of them anywhere.

Solas dragged his eyes up to her face. The light was not kind to him, as it had been before.

His voice was very hoarse. “Ruin,” he said.

Laeta felt her heart pulse on, steady and strong in her chest, just above the worst of the hurt.

“Do you still feel that way?” she asked.

Solas shut his eyes. “I don’t know,” he said. “I hope—I—”

He stopped talking. He inhaled slowly through his nose instead. His entire body turned towards her like a bending plant, but he still did not touch her, and he did not look at her.

It wasn’t enough, she thought. It wasn’t the whole of the why or the how, but in some way it was close. Perhaps it was foolish, but she did not want to bare the rest of it—not now, when he was here and sorry in front of her. In any case, she found it in her to relent after all.

Laeta picked up the pot between them and unscrewed the lid.

Inside was soft salve, freshly mixed with goose fat and herbs. A heady green smell rose from it as soon as she opened it, sharp and familiar.

Coltsfoot, she realized.

She looked up at him, and his face was softer, if just as uncertain. “I added it,” he said quietly. “I thought it would please you.”

“It does,” she whispered.

She picked up his hand where it was clutched in the blankets and gave him the pot. Then she drew off her shirt.

When she straightened, Solas did not look at her bare breasts, but at her face, searchingly, then at her scar. His expression became fixed once more, but not dangerously so. He studied her.

“May I?” he asked softly, looking up at her eyes once more.

“Yes,” she said.

The salve smeared thickly across her scar, cold and greasy, but it warmed quickly against her skin. His fingers were strong and he kept his other hand at her back, just so. Goosebumps erupted where he touched, but he did not turn it into a caress, merely held her with his fingertips.

Her emotions rose despite the hold she was trying to maintain on them.

She had tried to treat herself as gently, as best she could, but it broke her, a little, to receive it from someone else. She had not been touched with much in the way of gentleness since she had fallen.

The pressure increased, and she inhaled tightly through her nose without meaning to. Solas’s face was turned into the curve of her neck and she could not see it, but the fingertips at her back widened as if to steady her.

Then, heat, blooming out from her scar and sinking deeply into the space beneath. Into the muscles and bone, down to the worst hurt, the ghost of an arrowhead at the bottom of her breath that still cut at her throughout the day.

Solas murmured something into her neck, soothing her—she had made some sound, a flinch of a noise that escaped her without her notice. “A little longer,” he said. “Bear with me.”

She took his wrist in her hand where he touched her, and pressed it more firmly against her scar.

It grew very bad then.

For a moment, she felt the strike of the arrow all over again, the bite of iron and wood deep in her vitals—the scorching heat—and then, _nothing._ No pain, not even its shadow. She breathed out, every muscle sagging at once as Solas held her up, and it didn’t hurt, and it didn’t take something from her in the trade in doing so.

Solas clasped her back, cradling to him, and she allowed herself to be cradled. His cheek was alongside hers, his forehead pressed as deeply into her neck as it would allow. His lips brushed her skin as if by accident, but he did not kiss her, and she felt him draw back by some infinitesimal increment when he did.

Laeta still held tightly to his wrist, and breathed. The lack of pain made her feel like she was floating. Her thoughts mingled and ran together like water, clean and sweet and uncluttered by snarls in the current, and when she spoke she was as calm and as solemn as it was in her to be.

“Solas,” she said, and drew away to look at his face.

There were no more barriers there, no walls. Just his eyes, his chest rising and falling as he breathed, and the way he looked at her.

“If you feel,” she said, “that you must do that again. If you must leave—”

“ _Laeta,_ ” he said, and she almost shuddered, almost let her resolve break then and there.

She stopped him with her eyes. “If you must,” she whispered. “Then tell me. Don’t let me wonder.”

His eyes glittered. “And if I choose not to do that?” he asked, raw as a wound.

Her voice cracked. “Then love me,” she said. “I would like it if you loved me.”

Laeta raised her head and kissed him, a slow bruise of a kiss with her hand still locked on his wrist. He bent to meet her with his all his breath leaving him at once, catching at the end on some small sound that tore at her.

Eventually, she got him how she liked him best, even as her thoughts stretched and stuttered and nearly undid her. He stretched out beneath her, his hips against hers, and she slid a hand up under his shirt to encourage him to pull it off.

He obeyed her, arching his back as he did so, and then his skin was bared to her—pale, and faintly freckled, and warm as a coal under her hands. His arms rose to wrap around her, but he checked himself and let them lay on the coverlets instead, trembling with the effort it took, and let her do as she willed.

She did. She touched him as it pleased her, and it pleased him very much to be touched.

Later, when she tired, it was her turn to lie on her back, and he kept his weight off her as he set his teeth to her throat with aching, gentle pressure. He trailed a path down her body, murmuring soft, broken things against her skin as he did, and she clasped the back of his neck until he reached the space between her thighs and kissed her deeply.

He kissed her until she came, her body bending like a bow, and there was no pain, not even a whisper of it, and then he began to his fingers on her. She opened, slowly,and in increments, but he never rushed, never hurried what had always taken her time and strength to allow herself to do. She came again, shortly, and he pressed a searing open-mouthed kiss on her thigh when she did, his breath uneven and shaking.

She drew him back up to her when it was time and did not let him keep his weight from her when she did. She hooked her thigh around him and pressed them together, belly to chest to aching sex, and urged him wordlessly to move.

It was different than it had been before—not worse, not lacking, but she wondered at it even as her thoughts skipped like a rock over the water’s surface and she clutched with every muscle in her body. They both acted as if they couldn’t quite trust themselves to speak, and there were no moments of levity interspersed with the scorching reverence with which he touched her.

She had always found a way to laugh, during. But now, it wasn’t as if seriousness had found a way to puncture her joy, but that her joy itself had transformed into something heavy and tender and overwhelming—something that escaped her means to express it.

That was what didn’t suit her. And as his hips flexed against hers, she did her best to banish it by reaching up and nipping him hard along the jaw, sharp as a fox’s bite, then soothing it away before it could discourage him.

His eyes met hers—hooded, startled, and desperate—but she reached up and bumped noses, kissing him with a grin slicing unbidden across her face, and he _hmmf’_ d into her mouth before treating the challenge for what it was. She gave over control of the kiss, and he took it with a seriousness that was a joke all on its own.

She made a space for the kind of joy she wanted, and he met her there until it reached up to claim them both.

That was what she wanted most.

 

* * *

 

They talked, after. They always did; they never seemed to be able to help it.

Later, she wouldn’t remember what they said as much of the shape of it. Her own low voice floating over them both, while she felt more than heard his responding chuckle.

He stroked her like a cat, his long body supporting hers. His fingers carded through her hair in one long stroke after another, heat lingering in the places where he touched.

“It will return,” he said after a long silence, and she felt the reverberation from his voice travel up through his chest and into her cheek. “The pain.”

She had dozed, a little, but roused easily enough. She breathed out, then drew as much air into her lungs as she could.

She could feel it now, the hitch of pressure there at the bottom of her breath that would grow with time into something that demanded her attention.

“I imagine it will,” she said and rubbed her cheek on him before pressing a kiss to his sternum and settling back down.

She wasn’t troubled, even so. It was enough to have this, the moment between, where everything was soft and she was warm, and loved, and safe.

His fingers slowed as he matched her breathing almost without meaning to. “I will help,” he said, slow and cracked, then kissed her forehead, breathing in through his nose where it met her hair. “As much as I am able.”

“You are,” she murmured and tightened her arm as she shifted and made herself more comfortable. “And I will bear it.”

She heard his breath catch, but she was already sinking fast.

She hoped he would follow her, wherever she landed.

 

 

* * *

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> special thanks to my friend clara for providing edits and encouragement the entire way.


End file.
